What Happens When President Obama Uses Your Startup

Mixlr is a London-based startup founded in 2010 to make
broadcasting live audio easy and social. We now have more than
1.7 million users worldwide including professional musicians,
sports clubs and hundreds of thousands of
professionals-in-the-making. So in other words, we’re the ideal
platform for the President of the United States to use for a
live audio broadcast with 40,000 of his closest “friends”. Haha.

Except that
last night that happened. And now that the roller coaster is
finally slowing down, this is a reflection of how it went.

Buried amongst
our 1.7 million other users, rather inconspicuously and in a
pretty low maintenance way, Organizing for Action (OFA for short
and formerly known as Obama for America) has been a paying Mixlr
subscriber for the last 4 months and broadcast more than 20
times.

OFA signed up
to our premium plan which means they pay $9.99 per month
for their Mixlr account. Cool.

On Friday, one
of their representatives dropped us an email and said they wanted
to use their account to host an event on Monday (ie, 3
days later) with the President. Very cool.

Then they
blasted one of their famous email campaigns promoting this as a
“conference call” and tweeted it out to their 40
million followers. Um, still pretty crazy cool, but getting a
little surreal.

We’re used to
dealing with 10k concurrent listeners at any given time so when
the OFA team told us to expect tens of thousands for this
broadcast we weren’t too worried. But even so, when the President
of the United States is involved, you take a few precautions. We
worked all weekend to make sure we could actually scale up to
hundreds of thousands (just in case) and had the team ready to
stay up all night to monitor everything. (An 8:15
PM call on the East Coast in the US is 1:15
AM here in London, but we had our coffee.)

Unfortunately
the call was marketed and promoted as a “conference call” and
questions were invited in advance which gave people the
impression that this would be truly interactive – which
does happen to be what Mixlr is intended for – and
effectively like an AMA. However, in the end they didn’t really
use it that way nor to the extent of what Mixlr allows and it was
just a one-way broadcast. This led to some pretty mis-set
expectations and disappointed users which wasn’t a great tone to
recover from – and then we had the inevitable one server glitch
that caused some connection errors, but which got automatically
switched over and resolved within 2 minutes.

However, even
more unfortunately, after the technical issues
of healthcare.gov, the press are now all over the
OFA team and criticizing their ability to
procure technical solutions or web services (rightly or wrongly).
But in this case, obviously we’re a third party service provider
so this really has nothing to do with the President’s team’s
ability to execute. It’s analogous to criticising the President
for tweeting or posting to Instagram if either Twitter or
Instagram has some downtime. (Not that we had any
downtime!)

We’re pretty
proud of how well the broadcast went last night. We had over
140,000 listener sessions (undoubtedly our biggest broadcast to
date) and the call was flawless for the vast majority of those
listeners for more than 99% of the call. We think we can do even
better next time – Note to self: Even 10 trolls are a lot louder
than 30,000 supporters so next time disable comments when the
President’s got the mic! – and we’re definitely looking forward
to it.

Meanwhile,
even though we’re not US voters, our hats are off to the
President and his team for being agile, using third party web
services and trying to be as engaged as possible with his
constituents. We love that he’s done an AMA on Reddit, that his team
uses Twitter, Facebook andInstagram regularly, and we’re
seriously proud they now use Mixlr too.